HomeNews and ResourcesBlogOvercoming the global issue of incomplete online transactions

Overcoming the global issue of incomplete online transactions

Thu 13 Oct 2016

One of the many challenges that globalisation brings is in overcoming the rising incidence of abandoned online transactions.

While increased globalisation and the opportunity to expand into new territories has been a boon to many businesses – bringing literally millions of potential new customers within reach – one of the many challenges it brings is in overcoming the rising incidence of abandoned transactions.

Consumers worldwide now have a plethora of buying options available to them, not to mention a wealth of opportunities to compare prices and specifications. So in an increasingly competitive online landscape, retailers are rightly seeking to improve their commercial edge, in order to avoid the damage done to ecommerce platform profitability by incomplete transactions.

Naturally, there are many reasons for incomplete transactions; from consumer indecision to bad user experience (UX), with factors such as unexpected delivery charges or excessive delivery times also contributing to the frequency of incomplete purchases.

However, the price of the goods or service and the convenience of the payment method are two of the most significant factors when it comes to getting from 'Add To Basket' to 'Pay Now' as often as possible; both of which can be more easily overcome when online retailers find an 'enabler' that allows them to protect their profits while selling in other currencies and territories.

Driving Down Costs By Streamlining Pricing/Payment Processes

There are a number of incremental steps that every ecommerce business can take to reduce the incidence of incomplete transactions: from upgrading their address auto-completion software to removing the perceived obstacle of account creation as a step towards completing a purchase.

Yet because consumers can now browse, compare prices and buy from more businesses than ever, in more countries than ever, ensuring that your prices are competitive is key to every ecommerce business.

The problem is that putting the personnel, processes and payment platform in place to ensure a friction-free checkout is expensive and time consuming; all of which creates cost that must inevitably increase the price of the goods and services at the checkout.

Enabling Payments - and Protecting Profits - Around the World

First and foremost, online retailers require the ability to take payments on an international basis in order to avoid incomplete transactions. After all, wherever they are in the world, consumers now expect to be able to pay online quickly and easily, and will take their business elsewhere if that isn't possible.

Just as importantly, in a price-sensitive environment, every business that has a need to display online prices in local currencies faces the risk of losing both sales and profits where they don't have the ability to respond quickly enough to currency fluctuations in an increasingly volatile landscape.

Andy Brown, Managing Director of Equiniti International Payments commented:"We set rates for all of the major foreign currencies for our clients to lock into. They can then set their prices online, secure in the knowledge that their underlying profit margins are protected. This also enables them to price as aggressively as they need to in order to maintain market share and avoid all of the incomplete transactions that might ordinarily occur due to price sensitivity."

Equiniti International Payments offers Multi-Currency Pricing with Guaranteed rates (MCP+), which enables ecommerce businesses to not only offer competitive prices up front in order to mitigate the chance of abandoned baskets, but also ensure that projected profit margins are locked in.